Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking Daniel C. Dennett

• No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.
• Labels: Sometimes just creating a vivid name for something helps you keep track of it while you turn it around in your mind trying to understand it. Among the most useful labels, as we shall see, are warning labels or alarms, which alert us to likely sources of error.
• Examples: Some philosophers think that using examples in their work is, if not quite cheating, at least uncalled for--rather the way novelists shun illustrations in their novels.
• Analogies and metaphors: Mapping the features of a complex thing onto the features of one complex thing onto the features of another complex thing that you already (think you) understand is a famously powerful thinking tool, but it is so powerful that it often leads thinkers astray when their imaginations get captured by a treacherous analogy.
• Staging: You can shingle a roof, paint a house, or fix a chimney with the help of just a ladder, moving it and climbing, moving it and climbing, getting access to only a small part of the job at a time, but it’s often easier in the end to take the time at the beginning to erect some sturdy staging that will allow you to move swiftly and safely around the whole project.
• Thought experiments are among the favorite tools of philosophers, not surprisingly.
• Every word in your vocabulary is a simple thinking tool, but some are more useful than others.
• Acquiring tools and using them wisely are distinct skills, but you have to start by acquiring the tools, or making them yourself.
• Some of the most powerful thinking tools are mathematical, but aside from mentioning them, I will not devote much space to them because this is a book celebrating the power of non-mathematical tools, informal tools, the tools of prose and poetry, if you like, a power that scientists often underestimate.
• I have always figured that if I can’t explain something I’m doing to a group of bright undergraduates, I don’t really understand it myself, and that challenge has shaped everything I have written.
• Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them--if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.
• Making mistakes is the key to making progress.
• Mistakes are not just opportunities for learning; they are, in an important sense, the only opportunity for learning or making something truly new.
• Before there can be learning, there must be learners.
• The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them--especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are.
• The fundamental reaction to any mistake ought to be this: “Well, I won’t do that again!”
• We human beings pride ourselves on our intelligence, and one of its hallmarks is that we can remember our previous thinking, and reflect on it--on how it seemed, on why it was tempting in the first place, and then about what went wrong.
• So when you make a mistake, you should learn to take a deep breath, grit your teeth, and then examine your own recollections of the mistake as ruthlessly as dispassionately as you can manage.
• You should actively seek out opportunities to make grand mistakes, just so you can then recover from them.
• This general technique of making a more-or-less educated guess, working out its implications, and using the result to make a correction for the next phase has found many applications. A key element of this tactic is making a mistake that is clear and precise enough to have definite implications.
• Natural selection automatically conserves whatever has worked up to now, and fearlessly explores innovations large and small; the large ones almost always lead immediately to death.
• This, by the way, is another reason why we humans are so much smarter than every other species. It is not so much that our brains are bigger or more powerful, or even that we have the knack of reflecting on our own past errors, but that we share the benefits that our individual brains have won by their individual histories of trial and error.
• I am amazed at how many really smart people don’t understand they you can make big mistakes in public and emerge none the worse for it.
• Meta-advice: don’t take any advice too seriously!
• The crowbar of rational inquiry, the great lever that enforces consistency, is reductio ad absurdum--literally, reduction (of the argument) to absurdity. You take the assertion or conjecture at issue and see if you can pry any contradictions (or just preposterous implications) out of it. If you can, that proposition has to be discarded or sent back to the shop for retooling.
• Many non scientists don’t appreciate how wonderful oversimplifications can be in science; they can cut through the hideous complexity with a working model that is almost right, postponing the messy detail until later.
• How to compose a successful critical commentary:
• You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
• You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
• You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
• Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
• Ninety percent of science fiction is crud. But then ninety percent of everything is crud, and it’s the ten percent that isn’t crud that is important, and the ten percent of science fiction that isn’t crud is as good as or better than anything being written anywhere.
• Sturgeon’s Law is usually put a little less decorously: Ninety percent of everything is crap.
• The idea is straightforward: don’t concoct a complicated, extravagant theory if you’ve got a simpler one (containing fewer ingredients, fewer entities) that handles the phenomena just as well.
• The molecular biologist Sidney Brenne recently invented a delicious play on Occam’s Razor, introducing the new term Occam’s Broom, to describe the process in which inconvenient facts are whisked under the rug by intellectually dishonest champions of one theory or another.
• The absence of a fact that has been swept off the scene by Occam’s Broom is unnoticeable except by experts.
• Conspiracy theorists are masters of Occam’s Broom, and an instructive exercise on the Internet is to look up a new conspiracy theory, to see if you (a non expert on the topic) can find the flaws, before looking elsewhere on the web for the expert rebuttals.
• When experts talk to experts, whether they are in the same discipline or not, they always err on the side of under-explaining. The reason is not far to seek: to over-explain something to a fellow expert is a very serious insult--”Do I have to spell it out for your?”--and nobody wants to insult a fellow expert. So just to be safe, people err on the side of under-explaining.
• It is hard to find an application of Occam’s Broom, since it operates by whisking inconvenient facts out of sight, and it is even harder to achieve what Doug Hofstadter calls jootsing, which stands for “jumping out of the system.” This is an important tactic not just in science and philosophy, but also in the arts.
• Being creative is not just a matter of casting about for something novel--anybody can do that, since novelty can be found in any random juxtaposition of stuff--but of making the novelty jump out of some system, a system that has become somewhat established, for good reasons.
• It helps to know the tradition if you want to subvert it. That’s why so few dabblers or novices succeed in coming up with anything truly creative.
• As a general rule, when a long-standing controversy seems to be getting nowhere, with both “sides” stubbornly insisting they are right, as often as not the trouble is that there is something they both agree on that is just not so. Both sides consider it so obvious, in fact, that it goes without saying. Finding these invisible problem-poisoners is not an easy task, because whatever seems obvious to these warring experts is apt to seem obvious, on reflection, to just about everybody.
• Rathering is a way of sliding you swiftly and gently past a false dichotomy. The general form of a rathering is “It is not the case that blah blah blah, as orthodoxy would have you believe; it is rather that such and such and such--which is radically different.”
• When you’re reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for “surely” in the document, and check each occurence. Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word “surely” is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument, a warning label about a likely boom crutch. Why? Because it marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure about and hopes readers will also be sure about.
• Just as you should keep a sharp eye out for “surely”, you should develop a sensitivity for rhetorical questions in any argument or polemic.
• A rhetorical question has a question mark at the end, but it is not meant to be answered.
• Here is a good habit to develop: whenever you see a rhetorical question, try--silently, to yourself--to give it an unobvious answer.
• A deepity is a proposition that seems both important and true--and profound--but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. One one reading it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading it is true but trivial.
• A tool wielded well becomes almost as much a part of you as your hands and feet, and this is especially true of tools for thinking.
• The first step in any effective exploration is to get as clear as we can about our starting point and our equipment.
• If you simply make a habit of substituting the awkward word “aboutness” whenever you encounter the philosophical term “intentionality”, you will seldom go wrong.
• What this intuition pump shows it that nobody can have just one belief.
• If understanding comes in degrees, then belief, which depends on understanding, must come in degrees as well, even for such mundane propositions as this.
• The manifest image is the world as it seems to use in everyday life, full of solid objects, colors, and smells and tests, voices and shadows, plants and animals, and people and all their stuff: not only tables and chairs, bridges and churches, dollars and contracts, but also such intangible things as songs, poems, opportunities, and free will.
• Every organism, whether a bacterium or a member of Homo sapiens, has a set of things in the world that matter to it and which it therefore needs to discriminate and anticipate as best it can.
• Folk psychology is “what everyone knows” about their minds and the minds of others: people can feel pain or be hungry or thirsty and know the difference, they can remember events from their past, anticipate lots of things, see what is in front of their open eyes, hear what is said within earshot, deceive and be deceived, know where they are, recognize others, and so forth.
• We are born with an “agent detection device”, and it is on a hair trigger. When it misfires, as it often does in stressful circumstances, we tend to see ghosts, goblins, imps, leprechauns, fairies, gnomes, demons, and the like where all that is really there are waving branches, toppling stone walls, or creaking doors.
• Every physical thing, whether designed or alive or not, is subject to the laws of physics and hence behaves in ways that in principle can be explained and predicted from the physical stance.
• The brain’s multitudinous competences are so intertwined and interacting that there simply is no central place in the brain “where it all comes together” for consciousness.
• Before there can be comprehension, there has to be competence without comprehension.
• Computers are without a doubt the most potent thinking tools we have, not just because they take the drudergy out of many intellectual tasks, but also because many of the concepts computer scientists have invented are excellent thinking tools in their own right.
• Competence without Comprehension: Something--e.g. A register machine--can do perfect arithmetic without having to comprehend what it is doing.
• What a number in a register stands for depends on the program that we have composed.
• Since a number in a register can stand for anything, this means that the register machine can, in principle, be designed to “notice” anything, to “discriminate” any pattern or feature that can be associated with a number--or a number of numbers.
• Since a number can stand for anything, a number can stand for an instruction or an address.
• All the improvements in computers since Turing invented his imaginary paper-tape machine are simply ways of making them faster.
• Perhaps the most wonderful feature of computers is that because they are built up, by simple steps, out of parts (operations) that are also dead simple, there is simply no room for them to have any secrets up their sleeve.
• We human beings can learn things “piecemeal”, so there must be some way of adding independent facts roughly one at a time.
• The idea of natural selection is not very complex, but it is so powerful that some people cannot bear to contemplate it, and they desperately avert their attention as if it were a horrible dose of foul tasting medicine.
• Universal acid is a liquid so corrosive that it will eat through anything!
• After everything had been transformed by its encounter with universal acid, what would the world look like? Little did I realize that in a few years I would encounter an idea--Darwin’s idea--bearing an unmistakable likeless to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.
• Don’t settle for being a mindless drudge! Understand the principles of whatever we’re doing so we can do it better! This is surely excellent advice in most arenas of human activity.
• A curious feature of evolution by natural selection is that it depends crucially on events that “almost never” happen. For instance, speciation, the process in which a new species is generated by wandering away from its parent species, is an exceedingly rare event, but each of the millions of species that have existed on this plant got its start with an event of speciation.
• The secret ingredient of improvement everywhere in life is always the same: practice, practice, practice.
• A good rule of thumb, then, when confronting the apparent magic of the world of life and mind is to look for the cycles that are doing all the hard work.
• The generic term for what must be added to virtual words to make them more realistic is collision detection.
• “Qualia” is a “technical” term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us. Nothing, it seems, could you know more intimately than your own qualia; let the entire universe be some vast illusion, some more figment of Descartes’s evil demon, and yet what the figment is made of (for you) will be the qualia of your hallucinatory experiences.
• The way to reproduce human competence and hence comprehension (eventually) is to stack virtual machines on top of virtual machines on top of virtual machines--the power is in the system, not in the underlying hardware.
• If you can’t make a hard problem relatively simple, you are probably not going about it the right way. Simplification is not just for beginners.
• People are notoriously bad at creating actually random series. They tend to switch too often, avoiding choosing the same move two or three times in a row, for instance (which ought to occur fairly often in a genuinely random series).
• When we are too close to something, it is hard to see what it is.
• If it isn’t worth doing, it isn’t worth doing well.
• The alert I want to offer you is just this: try to avoid committing your precious formative years to a research agenda with a short shelf life. Philosophical fads quickly go extinct, and there may be some truth to the rule of thumb: the hotter the topic, the sooner it will burn out.
• One good test to make sure a philosophical project is not just exploring the higher-order truths of chmess is to see if people aside from philosophers actually play the game.
• Conceiving of something new is hard work, not just a matter of framing some idea in your mind, giving it a quick once-over and then endorsing it. What is inconceivable to use now may prove to be obviously conceivable when we’ve done some more work on it. And when we confidently declare that some things are truly impossible it is not so much because we find these things inconceivable as that we find we have conceived of their components so well, so exhaustively, that the impossibility of their conjunction is itself clearly conceivable.

START SMALL, STAY SMALL by Rob Walling & Mike Taber

• Seeking funding of any kind creates two problems. First, it involves a massive investment of time and focus, which distracts you from the important things, like making money and staying in business. Second, it makes modest success nearly impossible due to the limits it places on the potential markets you can pursue.
• If you’re self-funded with one or two founders, you can support your entire business from a tiny niche that provides $10k/month in revenue.
• Targeting a large, non-niche market is expensive in terms of marketing and support. It will eat you alive if you tackle it from the start.
• Point 1: An entrepreneur is a technical visionary who creates software for a niche market.
• Niche markets are critical. If you want to self-fund a startup you have to choose a niche.
• The genius of niches is they are too small for large competitors, allowing a nimble entrepreneur the breathing room to focus on an underserved audience. Once you’ve succeeded in that niche, you can leverage your success to establish credibility for your business to move into larger markets.
• Point 2: An entrepreneur merges existing technical knowledge with online marketing knowledge.
• The key factor in an entrepreneur’s success is their ability to market their product.
• Millions of people in this world can build software. A fractional subset of those can build software and convince people to buy it.
• Point 3: An entrepreneur is a cross between a developer, a webmaster, and a marketer.
• Marketing is more important than your product.
• With an enormous amount of anecdotes to back me up I strongly believe that building something no one wants is the most common source of failure for entrepreneurs.
• If you have an idea for a product, odds are high that you have project/product confusion.
• A project is a software application that you build as a fun side project.
• A product is a project that people will pay money for.
• Without a market, a software application is just a project.
• A million dollar payday is most likely not in your future, but owning a successful startup can be.
• Writing code, where most of us are well-versed, is only about 30% of the work needed to launch a successful product.
• The other 70% is debugging, optimizing, creating an installer, writing documentation, building a sales website, opening a merchant account, advertising, promoting, processing sales, providing support, and a hundred other things we’ll dive into in later modules.
• It’s hard to re-train your mind out of the dollars-for-hours mentality.
• It’s a long road to becoming a successful entrepreneur.
• Remember that there is no single best path to success as a startup founder.
• I have a suggestion to help get you started: Strive to build a startup that generates $500 per month in profit. This may sound like an easy goal, but will require more work than you can fathom at this point.
• The reason you need goals and accountability is to stay motivated during the hard times.
• Once you launch a product, you are instantly building equity.
• This is by far the most common mistake I’ve seen – building something no one wants.
• It’s a common belief that building a good product is enough to succeed. It’s not.
• Avoid this roadblock by building a product after you’ve verified there is a market.
• The first time you try something it’s scary.
• As humans we fear the unknown. We fear failure…rejection…mistakes.
• Surprisingly, anything is much easier the second time.
• Without goals for both yourself and your startup you are flying blind without guidance in situations where there is no right or wrong answer.
• You’ve already heard this a few times, but define your goals and write them down.
• The main problem with inconsistency is that it makes you lose momentum and momentum is critical to staying productive.
• Another common distraction masquerading as productivity is reading business books.
• most of the information we consume is a waste of time.
• You can’t consume and produce at the same time
• It’s not easy, but scaling back your information consumption will have a huge impact on your productivity.
• Drip outsourcing has become invaluable to my productivity.
• The bottom line is to start small, gain comfort with a contractor, and gradually increase the amount you outsource.
• Outsourcing is a learned skill, and you’re likely to screw it up your first time around. Start with non-critical tasks and be very specific in how they should be executed.
• Design is much easier to outsource than programming.
• It’s a big leap moving from employee to entrepreneur. One of the biggest adjustments is accepting that time is your most precious commodity.
• Putting a value on your time is a foundational step in becoming an entrepreneur, and it’s one many entrepreneurs never take.
• Outsourcing aspects of your business is the single most powerful approach I’ve seen to increasing your true hourly rate as an entrepreneur.
• Wasting time is bad.
• If you aren’t enjoying something, stop doing it.
• Writing down important ideas is critical to building a list of ways to improve your business.
• Information Consumption is Only Good When it Produces Something
• Consuming and synthesizing are very different things; it’s easy to consume in mass quantity. It’s much more difficult to synthesize information.
• If you haven’t already, you will soon need to accept you are going to fail a lot.
• The faster you fail and learn from your mistakes, the faster you will improve.
• You Will Never Be Done
• The first month you launch you will be lucky to break $100 in revenue.
• A product, marketing effort, and a reputation take time to build.
• The effort of getting a new product off the ground is exponentially more than launching a new product once you have resources and experience behind you.
• Documenting repeatable processes for anything you will do more than once is essential to your sanity.
• You can sell garbage to a hungry market and make money.
• What matters is finding a group of people who need your something more than they need the money you’re charging for it.
• If you choose a niche market and focus so tightly that your product becomes the best in class, members of that niche will have no choice but to use your product.
• A Niche Requires You to Narrow Your Product Focus
• The lesson here is that the narrower you can make your product while still maintaining a large enough market, the more profit you will generate.
• if you can find a small group of people and make them amazingly happy, you will make money.
• The most common mistake made by inexperienced marketers is attacking a market that’s too large.
• In general, since niche markets are small they have less competition, and less competition means you are able to charge more for your product, resulting in higher margins.
• In smaller markets it’s easier to make a name for yourself since people are more likely to hear about you multiple times in a shorter time period.
• things will never be as clear as you want them to be.
• One way to avoid the multi-step process of brainstorming niches, evaluating demand and selecting a product is to jump right to a product idea.
• The best niches are under the radar, and you have to get out and do something before you will find them.
• As a self-funded startup you want a market that is already looking for your product, even if it doesn’t exist.
• This is because creating demand is very, very expensive while filling existing demand is, by comparison, cheap.
• Any target market you choose must be online and you must have a product that solves their problem.
• From a startup perspective, vertical market niches are superior to horizontal markets for a number of reasons we’ll look at below.
• Members of a Vertical Have Similar Behavior
• Members of a Vertical Talk to One Another
• Small industries tend to have a handful of thought leaders.
• If your product is good, word of mouth marketing will spread quickly
• If you can find the thought leaders and convince them to adopt your product, you will receive massive exposure in a short period of time
• Members of a Vertical “Hang out” Together
• Members of a Vertical Have Similar Needs
• As a general rule, horizontal markets are too large and expensive for self-funded startups to navigate.
• You only need to master two skills to sell online: human behavior and math.
• Understanding human behavior means you know how people think, what motivates them. You need to know how to speak to the voice inside of them that makes buying decisions, rather than their tough, rational exterior.
• Math is the science behind every business in the world, whether they realize it or not. With internet marketing, the math involves views, clicks, click through rates, unique visitors, goals, conversion rates, gross profit and net profit.
• The term “conversion rate” technically refers to the ratio of the number of people who visit your website to the number that perform a specific task.
• Marketing is not programming; there are no exact numbers when projecting conversions.
• There are a few dozen free keyword difficulty tools on the web, but the vast majority of them are junk.
• Estimating demand with a keyword tool is one thing, but watching the behavior of real website visitors as they click through your website, browse, and try or buy is a completely different experience.
• The only way you know if someone would try or buy your product is if they think they are really trying or buying it when they visit your sales site.
• The mini sales site approach works best if you are selling a downloadable or web-based (SaaS) application.
• The success of your product will depend on three things: product, market and execution, which together make up what I call the Product Success Triangle.
• Product - Your product has to be good
• Market - You need a group of people willing to pay money for it
• Execution – You have to market, sell, and support it
• But a brilliant product with no market or execution is dead. A mediocre product with brilliant marketing and execution will make you money.
• Once you know you have a market and can execute, then you can improve your product.
• As a rule of thumb, your path to 1.0 should fall between 200 and 400 hours.
• This is the most common mistake I’ve seen with 1.0 products – too many features and too many months between the start of development and launch.
• If you’re coding in your spare time, it will be a stretch to get 15 hours of productive work in per week.
• If you have a few thousand dollars set aside, you should consider hiring out development.
• Letting it go and stepping away from the code will increase your chance of launching.
• You have to get over your desire to write the software yourself.
• Determining your price is one of the most challenging aspects of launching a product.
• Lean towards higher pricing. Developers tend to undervalue their software, and think that lower prices will result in higher sales. This is typically not the case.
• Ensure that as your price doubles from tier to tier, you provide more than double the benefit.
• Human behavior is irrational. This means no one knows the right pricing structure for your product.
• When thinking about a new application aimed at businesses, start with the position of a hosted web application. The ease of support, ease of adoption, and recurring revenue model are major advantages.
• The idea behind the sales funnel is that there are several steps between someone surfing the internet and buying your product.
• In a successful sales website, every page has a single, primary call to action. That is, an action you want your user to take.
• No One Reads. Text is a terrible selling tool; audio, video and images are always better.
• One of the most difficult pieces of marketing to create is your hook. Your hook is your four-second sales pitch and it should be the headline of your home page. It’s the single sentence that grabs the reader in and makes her know she’s in the right place.
• Double opt-in means that after they enter their email address in your sign-up form, they will receive a confirmation link via email. Until they click on that link they are not added to your list. This ensures that your list is of the highest quality.
• Maintaining high relevance is critical to keeping people subscribed.
• Another great source of content is questions from customers or prospects. Answer the question in your email to solidify your place as an expert in this niche.
• Perhaps the only factor that determines if your mail gets opened is your subject line.
• Core strategies like building an audience, search engine optimization and participating in niche communities have far more impact on your bottom line than most of the new media tools you read about in the business press.
• Traffic quality plays a huge role in how well your website converts visitors into customers.
• High quality traffic means each visitor is very close to your ideal customer and they know and trust you.
• Top Shelf: Traffic Strategies that Will Sustain a Business
• 1. A Mailing List
• 2. A Blog, Podcast or Video Blog
• 3. Organic Search
• Building an audience through a mailing list, blog or podcast is by far the best source of traffic. I encourage you to try at least one.
• My recommendation for PPC is to use it for finding keywords that convert for you, and spend the time and money to search engine optimize for those terms.
• So instead of looking at PPC as a long-term marketing approach, use it as a shortcut for finding keywords that convert and work on ranking organically for those terms.
• A mailing list is the most effective marketing tool you will possess. It works in any market. It’s a marketing requirement for startups.
• Getting people to engage with you, to listen to and trust you will have more impact on sales than any other marketing approach.
• Blogs, podcasts and video blogs require a certain amount of unique insight or expertise.
• Most products you launch should have their own blog, if for nothing else than to draw search engine traffic.
• Google alerts is one of the most under-used tools in online marketing.
• A virtual assistant (VA) is a remote worker hired to complete tasks you prefer not to do, or should not be doing as the founder of a startup.
• Outsourcing to a virtual assistant will dramatically reduce the time you need to spend on administrative tasks, and increase the time you can commit to growing your business.
• Through a bit of outsourcing to a VA, you can get to market with less up-front expense and in dramatically less time than if you try to automate everything.
• Every hour spent writing code is wasted time if that code could be replaced by a human being doing the same task until your product proves itself.
• As I’ve automated pieces of my businesses, I’ve noticed an interesting trend: nearly anything I try to automate is easier to outsource first, and then automate down the line once the volume warrants it.
• In addition, outsourcing provides you with a written process for the task that serves as a blueprint if the time comes later to automate it.
• Outsourcing is a learned skill, just like writing code.
• I’ve had the best results hiring VA’s in the Philippines.
• Finding a VA is about trial and error.
• Most startups that achieve early success find themselves in the chasm. That place Geoffrey Moore talks about in his seminal work Crossing the Chasm, where early adopters are using your product and you are trying to solve the puzzle to get to mass adoption.
• Starting a company requires enormous amounts of effort and time, and can’t be done in parallel.
• With the ability to attack niches that can provide $500-$2000/month in income, you are able to fly under the radar of most businesses.
• Being self-employed is risky business, but it’s even riskier if you own a single product.
• The biggest downside to owning multiple products is the task switching.
• Do not build or buy your second product until you have outsourced or automated as much as you possibly can with your first product.
• Here is the formula for Serial Micropreneurship:
• 1. Build or buy a product
• 2. Launch or revamp it
• 3. Grow revenue to its natural plateau
• 4. Outsource and automate ruthlessly
• 5. Go to step 1
• Once your product is built and launched there are three areas that will require ongoing maintenance:
• Support
• New Features
• Marketing
• Let me be clear about one thing: no product is going to sell at the same level forever. It’s going to need updates at some point.
• Ad campaigns require an initial investment and then a tiny amount of weekly or even monthly maintenance. Once you’ve found keywords that convert and ads that work, you only have to adjust as your competition changes.
• Once SEO is in place, it’s all about maintenance.
• If your startup does not turn a profit, the odds of making an exit for anything more than a few thousand dollars is remote.
• Even if you never plan to sell your startup, you should be collecting and reviewing the data that will ultimately allow you to facilitate an easy sale.
• Make sure your product doesn’t share a database with another website. Keep things separate so it can be easily migrated to another server.

ASTROPHYSICS FOR PEOPLE IN A HURRY by Neil de Grasse Tyson

• Science thrives not only on the universality of physical laws but also on the existence and persistence of physical constants.
• All measurements suggest that the known fundamental constants, and the physical laws that reference them, are neither time-dependent nor location-dependent. They’re truly constant and universal.
• After the big bang, the main agenda of the cosmos was expansion, ever diluting the concentration of energy that filled space.
• When something glows from being heated, it emits light in all parts of the spectrum, but will always peak somewhere.
• Our senses detect infrared only in the form of warmth on our skin.
• Because light takes time to reach us from distant places in the universe, if we look out in deep space we actually see eons back in time.
• Further research has revealed that the dark matter cannot consist of ordinary matter that happens to be under-luminous, or nonluminous.
• Science is not just about seeing, it’s about measuring, preferably with something that’s not your own eyes, which are inextricably conjoined with the baggage of your brain. That baggage is more often than not a satchel of preconceived ideas, post-conceived notions, and outright bias.
• Trivial questions sometimes require deep and expansive knowledge of the cosmos just to answer them.
• The element carbon can be found in more kinds of molecules than the sum of all other kinds of molecules combined.
• Spheres in nature are made by forces, such as surface tension, that want to make objects smaller in all directions.
• For large cosmic objects, energy and gravity conspire to turn objects into spheres. Gravity is the force that serves to collapse matter in all directions, but gravity does not always win—chemical bonds of solid objects are strong.
• The cosmic mountain-building recipe is simple: the weaker the gravity on the surface of an object, the higher its mountains can reach. Mount Everest is about as tall as a mountain on Earth can grow before the lower rock layers succumb to their own plasticity under the mountain’s weight.
• Well-conducted experiments require a “control”—a measurement where you expect no effect at all, and which serves as a kind of idiot-check on what you are measuring.
• Computer studies of meteor strikes demonstrate conclusively that surface rocks near impact zones can get thrust upward with enough speed to escape the body’s gravitational tether.
• Earth’s Moon is about 1/400th the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 1/400th as far from us, making the Sun and the Moon the same size on the sky—a coincidence not shared by any other planet–moon combination in the solar system, allowing for uniquely photogenic total solar eclipses.
• Even if you’re bad at math, you’re probably much better at it than the smartest chimpanzee, whose genetic identity varies in only trifling ways from ours.

Survive Like a Spy by Jason Hanson

• But in the real world of spies, things aren’t always what they seem.
• What do spies really do? They recruit people who have information that the U.S. government feels can be beneficial to our national security.
• HUMINT is simply any information that can be gathered from human sources.
• the number one thing a case officer is looking for in an agent is a person with access.
• Money problems, revenge, and anger are sometimes reasons a person decides to spy for the United States.
• One of the most attractive carrots to dangle in the espionage game is the promise of a fully funded top-notch education for a recruit’s son or daughter at one of America’s finest colleges or universities.
• SPY TRAIT #1: THE RIGHT MIND-SET
• Things aren’t always cut-and-dry; you can’t plan everything in advance.
• SPY TRAIT # 2: SPIES ARE EMPATHETIC
• SPY TRAIT # 3: NO MATTER WHAT YOU SEE, YOU DON’T SHOW FEAR
• SPY TRAIT # 4: SPIES ARE SOCIAL PEOPLE
• SPY TRAIT # 5: SPIES UNDERSTAND THAT MANIPULATING PEOPLE IS PART OF THE JOB
• The ability to manipulate a person, to get him to do what you want while thinking it’s actually what he wants, makes the difference between succeeding and not succeeding.
• SPY TRAIT # 6: SPIES ARE FLEXIBLE AND READY FOR ANYTHING
• I soon learned that if things go horribly wrong there are two ways out—you can talk your way out or walk your way out.
• A spy must decide his best course of action and execute immediately, and often alone.
• Assume nothing. Never go against your gut. Everyone is potentially under opposition control. Don’t look back; you are never completely alone. Go with the flow, blend in. Vary your pattern and stay within your cover. Lull them into a sense of complacency. Don’t harass the opposition. Pick the time and place for action. Keep your options open.
• RESEARCH GIVES YOU AN EDGE
• Research can be the key to success, and I believe this is true for everyone, no matter what your end goal.
• KNOW THE AREA
• Always make it a point to be familiar with your surroundings—at work, at home, at school, and wherever you’re traveling.
• Being familiar with your surroundings can also help you notice when something is off—signaling that you need to be aware of potential danger.
• Spying is much messier and less precise than you might expect.
• A dead drop is a method of exchanging information between a case officer and an agent. An item (notes, tool, codebook) is inserted into a concealment device, and then dropped in a predetermined place for the other person to later retrieve.
• Like any good spy, I always have a camera ready,
• TAKE ADVANTAGE OF OPPORTUNITIES
• Spies use ordinary cameras that take extraordinary film. Since most of the pictures we take are incriminating, the film is a special variety that can be developed only by the CIA. If I’m ever caught and my camera is taken, the film contains nothing that could get me killed or land me in jail for the rest of my life.
• TACTIC #1: COVER STOPS AND HUNKER-DOWN SITES
• Please always remember, if you ever feel your life is truly in danger, call the police immediately.
• Cover Stops Can Be Anything, but They Need to Make Sense
• A cover stop is any public place you can pop into.
• But preplanning cover stops or hunker-down sites is easy, and it could keep you safe. Simply note various places near your home or workplace where you could go if you think you’re being followed.
• Having a plan you can quickly execute in a dangerous situation can keep you from ending up in harm’s way.
• TACTIC #2: THE SAFE SITE
• The most important thing you need to know about creating a safe site is that it’s anything you need it to be.
• TACTIC #3: THE CACHE
• The Safest Cache: A Storage Facility
• The most important element of a cache, for practical purposes, is that it is located away from your primary residence.
• You want your cache of extra supplies to be outside of your home, but easily accessible.
• If you really want to bury a cache, the safest way to protect your items is by building a simple PVC cache.
• Wear gloves when creating your cache, or wipe down surfaces with WD-40, to eliminate fingerprints.
• Spies can’t approach a Russian directly because Russians are immediately suspicious of Americans.
• not knowing a city can ruin an op—or even get you killed.
• One of the first things I do when I start to case a new city is memorize multiple routes to and from all the places I’ll be going.
• REASSESS YOUR SURROUNDINGS
• You may think you know your town like the back of your hand. The truth is, our environments change all the time, and it’s easy to miss something unless you make it a point to pay attention.
• Make a point of reassessing your surroundings on a regular basis.
• An intrusion point is a place where you can pop inside, forcing the person to follow you in if they want to know what you’re doing. If they do, you’ve just confirmed with as much certainty as you can that you’re under surveillance.
• Tradecraft says, “Never trust anyone,” but that’s not something I buy into. There are many times when allowing myself to trust someone has saved my life during an op.
• BE READY FOR PLAN B
• A witting spy is knowingly accepting compensation for the information he’s giving to his agent, and he’s aware that he’s actually spying for the U.S. government.
• Spies always follow a surveillance detection route after a meeting.
• All it takes is one careless move to ruin an operation and get someone killed.
• A spy has to be vigilant—always.
• Covert communication is really an art. While simplicity is key when using signals, it’s something that must be practiced regularly to execute properly.
• Developing simple signals and code words of your own is an excellent way to communicate with your family when you feel like you might be in danger.
• One encounter = an accident; two times = a coincidence; three times = enemy action.
• If someone is still behind you after three or four turns, it’s a safe bet that you’re under surveillance.
• Making a stop while on an SDR can be a powerful tool.
• A reversal is a turn that allows you to look back to see if you’re being followed.
• ALWAYS NOTE EXITS AND ALTERNATIVE EXITS
• Get in the habit of noticing exit points when you go out in public. It could save your life someda
• Never escalate a situation—always attempt to diffuse it.
• Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are a major concern in the age of terrorism.
• When the blast occurs, the first and most important thing you need to do is hit the ground and stay as low as possible.
• It’s human nature to freeze—but in many cases, doing nothing and being in a state of shock can get you killed. But equally important, while it’s crucial that you react, running away isn’t necessarily the right thing to do. You have to carefully observe your immediate surroundings first.
• The rule of thumb with an explosion is this: if there was one bomb, there’s probably more.
• Unstable people can be very dangerous,
• Opposition creates more opposition.
• You shouldn’t approach the group that’s bothering you if you feel you are in physical danger—again, that’s a job for the police.
• Always Remember: MORE AWARENESS = MORE DILIGENCE = MORE DETERRENCE
• Listen to your children. Children are incredibly observant. If your child notes that someone in your immediate vicinity has a weapon, pay attention and get out of the area immediately.
• Always pay attention to individuals who might be following you, and never drive directly to your house if you suspect you are being followed.
• Always pay attention to people who’ve been in an area longer than you have.
• Never show up acting like you know everything.
• ANTICIPATE
• Always anticipate potential outcomes and prepare for each one.
• FIRST IMPRESSIONS ARE EVERYTHING—DEVELOP A GOOD RAPPORT
• The goal of that introduction is to present yourself as an interesting enough person that you’ll leave having the “first meet” already set up.
• Avoid giving advice. What people want is approval.
• USE THE “WEAPONS OF MASS INFLUENCE,” OR RASCLS—RECIPROCATION, AUTHORITY, SCARCITY, CONSISTENCY (ALSO COMMITMENT), LIKING, AND SOCIAL PROOF
• Human beings are complicated.
• When you give a person something early on in a relationship, it usually creates a sense of obligation.
• People are drawn to things that are rare or scarce.
• We don’t trust people who aren’t consistent, that’s just common sense.
• The art of elicitation involves manipulating a conversation so that the target starts to give away information that’s of great interest, without necessarily realizing he’s done so.
• When done well, elicitation is so subtle that the target will likely have no idea what’s happening.
• Humans are wired to want to appear knowledgeable and have a tendency to want to correct inaccurate information.
• Delivering false statements tends to prompt people to answer with correct information.
• Be Aware of Sharing Knowledge When You Shouldn’t
• It’s never easy to tell the difference between a casual conversation and elicitation, and to complicate things people generally want to be polite.
• You’ve got to be careful not to “heat up the area” too much when working an op.
• “Violence of action” means to use all strength, speed, surprise, and aggression to fight your enemy.
• The actual abduction is one of the two most dangerous phases in the kidnapping process. (If you survive the abduction, the rescue will be the other part of the process where you are also at high risk of being killed.)
• There are two kinds of kidnapping. In the first kind, you’re a high-value target and your kidnappers believe they will receive a large ransom for your return.
• In the other kind of kidnapping, you are being snatched solely for access to your bank account or car.
• The longer you’re held captive, the greater the chance you’ll get out alive.
• The secret to accessing restricted areas is simple—just act like you’re supposed to be there.
• By having a clearer idea of how you perceive things, you can move through the OODA loop process faster.
• Becoming aware of how you process information can have a huge impact on outcomes—whether you’re dealing with a big business decision or an imminent threat.
• Build Relationships Everywhere You Go
• During an introduction, when the other person says their name, say it back to them while giving them a big but sincere smile.
• I recommend finding out where the U.S. embassy or consulate is located before you travel outside the United States.
• A P100 Mask: In the event of a chemical attack, this mask can actually filter out much of the harmful chemicals, as well as ash, dust, and other toxins that will be floating around in the air.
• Keeping a simple pair of safety goggles handy will enable you to keep your eyes open, making it easier for you to escape to safety.
• THE BATHTUB SPOUT: Simply stick the item you want to hide up the bathtub spout, and then pack it with toilet paper so it doesn’t fall out.
• THE SHOWER CURTAIN ROD: This takes a bit more time and energy, but it’s a good hiding place. Use your multitool to pry off one of the ends of the curtain rod, and stash your cash or valuables in the tube.
• Don’t sabotage a situation because you refuse to be flexible.
• Double-check details when making plans to avoid mistakes that can cost you frustration, time, money, or life.
• A dead drop is a standard way of passing something along to another person covertly.
• Being able to recognize people in different environments is a very important skill for a spy to have, and it’s also incredibly difficult to master
• WEIGH YOUR RISKS AND REWARDS
• There’s no point in taking a risk just for risk’s sake.
• Compare the risks to the rewards before going forward with decisions that could have unwelcome or even dire consequences.
• YOU CAN’T CONTROL EVERYTHING
• You can never stop thinking about new ways to solve problems.
• Always have a self-defense tool on your person to protect yourself. The number one tool that I carry, and so do my family members and clients, is the Tactical Pen.
• SOMETIMES A SIMPLE WAY IS A BETTER WAY
• Don’t dismiss an opportunity because it might seem too simple or too small.
• Sometimes the best way to get a person to trust you is by asking someone to give you a personal introduction.
• Password entropy is a measure of how predictable a password is and how hard it would be for a criminal to crack.
• Email was never meant to be secure.
• Using a VPN is a must for anyone who uses a public Wi-Fi to do work, and I never surf public Wi-Fi without using my VPN.
• Don’t simply open every email you receive. If something seems off to you, do not open it. Delete the email.
• I highly recommend having an emergency backup plan when it comes to water.
• Have a high-quality, easy-to-use filter ready to go:
• Never engage with another person unless it's the only way to save your life
• can’t stress enough how important it is to first try to de-escalate a situation before using self-defense tactics.
• it’s also important that you remember that nearly anything can be a weapon.
• Pro tip: If you are traveling and want to create a weapon using a sock, just buy an ordinary can of soda and stick it inside. (They’ll even give you the can when you’re on an airplane.)
• Replace your key chain with a long strap. This turns your keys into a flail.
• Whatever weapon you decide to use, remember that your best bet is always to use the weapon to create an opportunity to escape to safety.
• Most doors today are hollow and thin—and provide almost nothing in the way of protection. If at all possible, replace hollow doors with solid wood or steel doors that would be much harder to break down. If you want to take things up a notch, consider replacing a wooden doorjamb with a sturdier steel one.
• I highly recommend making a point of practicing your security measures everywhere you go.

LYING by Sam Harris and Annaka Harris

• Among the many paradoxes of human life, this is perhaps the most peculiar and consequential: We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy
• Lying is the royal road to chaos.
• Deception can take many forms, but not all acts of deception are lies. Even the most ethical among us regularly struggle to keep appearances and reality apart.
• The boundary between lying and deception is often vague. It is even possible to deceive with the truth.
• To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.
• People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs—that is, the more a person’s well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people’s opinions—the more consequential the lie.
• To speak truthfully is to accurately represent one’s beliefs. But candor offers no assurance that one’s beliefs about the world are true.
• The intent to communicate honestly is the measure of truthfulness.
• Many of us lie to our friends and family members to spare their feelings.
• The liar often imagines that he does no harm so long as his lies go undetected. But the one lied to rarely shares this view. The moment we consider our dishonesty from the perspective of those we lie to, we recognize that we would feel betrayed if the roles were reversed.
• The opportunity to deceive others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance of deception casts us onto some of the steepest ethical terrain we ever cross.
• At least one study suggests that 10 percent of communication between spouses is deceptive.
• Lying is ubiquitous, and yet even liars rate their deceptive interactions as less pleasant than truthful ones.
• Research suggests that all forms of lying—including white lies meant to spare the feelings of others—are associated with less satisfying relationships.
• Once one commits to telling the truth, one begins to notice how unusual it is to meet someone who shares this commitment.
• Honest people are a refuge: You know they mean what they say; you know they will not say one thing to your face and another behind your back; you know they will tell you when they think you have failed—and for this reason their praise cannot be mistaken for mere flattery.
• Honesty is a gift we can give to others. It is also a source of power and an engine of simplicity. Knowing that we will attempt to tell the truth, whatever the circumstances, leaves us with little to prepare for. Knowing that we told the truth in the past leaves us with nothing to keep track of. We can simply be ourselves in every moment.
• In committing to being honest with everyone, we commit to avoiding a wide range of long-term problems, but at the cost of occasional short-term discomfort.
• Lying is the lifeblood of addiction. If we have no recourse to lies, our lives can unravel only so far without others’ noticing.
• Telling the truth can also reveal ways in which we want to grow but haven’t.
• Ethical transgressions are generally divided into two categories: the bad things we do (acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission). We tend to judge the former far more harshly.
• Doing something requires energy, and most morally salient actions are associated with conscious intent.
• Failing to do something can arise purely by circumstance and requires energy to rectify.
• Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding—these and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs, whether or not our lies are ever discovered.
• By lying, we deny our friends access to reality9—and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate.
• False encouragement is a kind of theft: It steals time, energy, and motivation that a person could put toward some other purpose.
• When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives—about how they appear, their reputations, or their prospects in the world.
• When we pretend not to know the truth, we must also pretend not to be motivated by it.
• The opportunity to say something useful to the people we love soon disappears, never to return.
• Failures of personal integrity, once revealed, are rarely forgotten.
• Yes, it can be unpleasant to be told that we have wasted time, or that we are not performing as well as we imagined, but if the criticism is valid, it is precisely what we most need to hear to find our way in the world.
• Sparing others disappointment and embarrassment is a great kindness. And if we have a history of being honest, our praise and encouragement will actually mean something.
• A commitment to honesty does not necessarily require that we disclose facts about ourselves that we would prefer to keep private.
• To agree to keep a secret is to assume a burden. At a minimum, one must remember what one is not supposed to talk about. This can be difficult and lead to clumsy attempts at deception.
• Nevertheless, I still find that a willingness to be honest—especially about things that one might be expected to conceal—often leads to much more gratifying exchanges with other human beings.
• One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts you at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless.
• One of the greatest problems for the liar is that he must keep track of his lies.
• Psychopaths can assume the burden of mental accounting without any obvious distress. That is no accident: They are psychopaths.
• Lies beget other lies.
• When you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of. The world itself becomes your memory, and if questions arise, you can always point others back to it.
• A commitment to the truth is naturally purifying of error.
• Integrity consists of many things, but it generally requires us to avoid behavior that readily leads to shame or remorse.
• To lie is to erect a boundary between the truth we are living and the perception others have of us.
• It is simply astonishing how people destroy their marriages, careers, and reputations by saying one thing and doing another.
• Vulnerability comes in pretending to be someone you are not.
• Big lies have led many people to reflexively distrust those in positions of authority.
• We seem to be predisposed to remember statements as true even after they have been disconfirmed.
• The moment one begins dropping bombs, or destroying a country’s infrastructure with cyber attacks, lying has become just another weapon in the arsenal.
• The need for state secrets is obvious. However, the need for governments to lie to their own people seems to me to be virtually nonexistent.
• I suspect that the telling of necessary lies will be rare for anyone but a spy—assuming we grant that espionage is ethically defensible in today’s world.
• The role of a spy strikes me as a near total sacrifice of personal ethics for a larger good—whether real or imagined. It is a kind of moral self-immolation.
• The ethics of war and espionage are the ethics of emergency—and are, therefore, necessarily limited in scope.
• Most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled and sustained by lies.
• Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others.
• Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.
• Ultimately, we all die, and the only question is, what have you done between the time you’re born and the time you die?
• I think that growth is encouraged by accurate feedback. Telling children they are always accomplishing wonderful things regardless of their actual accomplishments is not going to serve them when they face the world. Having a positive mental attitude toward life is prudential, but being overconfident in your abilities is not.
• You’ve got to be honest about who you are—about what you know and don’t know and about what you can and can’t do—and still be willing to try things and experiment.
• As parents, we must maintain our children’s trust—and it seems to me that the easiest way to lose it is by lying to them. Of course, we should communicate the truth in ways that they can handle—and this often demands that we suppress details that would be confusing or needlessly disturbing.
• An important difference between children and (normal) adults is that children are not fully capable of conceiving of (much less looking out for) their real interests.
• Children have fantasy lives so rich and combustible that rigging them with lies is like putting a propeller on a rocket.
• A prison is perhaps the easiest place to see the power of bad incentives.
• We need systems that are wiser than we are. We need institutions and cultural norms that make us more honest and ethical than we tend to be. The project of building them is distinct from—and, in my view, even more important than—an individual’s refining his personal ethical code.
• Howard has put much of his material in book form: R.A. Howard and C.D. Korver, Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 2008).

A MANUAL FOR CREATING ATHEISTS by by Peter Boghossian and Michael Shermer

• We skeptics like to say, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
• God sacrificed himself to himself to save us from himself. Barking mad!
• when you are in the religious bubble everything makes sense and there is no such thing as chance, randomness, and contingencies.
• I call this activist approach to helping people overcome their faith, “Street Epistemology.”
• Let’s be blunt, direct, and honest with ourselves and with others.
• Socrates … said that wisdom is the key to happiness. Socrates was a skeptic about happiness, because we do not possess wisdom—no one he knows has wisdom.
• When pressed, the faithful will offer vague definitions that are merely transparent attempts to evade criticism, or simplistic definitions that intentionally muddy the meaning of “faith.”
• A deepity is a statement that looks profound but is not. Deepities appear true at one level, but on all other levels are meaningless.
• The words we use are important. They can help us see clearly, or they can confuse, cloud, or obscure issues.
• If one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. “Faith” is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief, but when one just goes ahead and believes anyway.
• “Believing something anyway” is an accurate definition of the term “faith.”
• Not everything that’s a case of pretending to know things you don’t know is a case of faith, but cases of faith are instances of pretending to know something you don’t know.
• As a Street Epistemologist, whenever you hear the word “faith,” just translate this in your head as, “pretending to know things you don’t know.”
• Faith and hope are not synonyms.
• Give me a sentence where one must use the word “faith,” and cannot replace that with “hope,” yet at the same time isn’t an example of pretending to know something one doesn’t know.
• A difference between an atheist and a person of faith is that an atheist is willing to revise their belief (if provided sufficient evidence); the faithful permit no such revision.
• The problem with agnosticism is that in the last 2,400 years of intellectual history, not a single argument for the existence of God has withstood scrutiny. Not one.
• “Agnostic” and “agnosticism” are unnecessary terms.
• Faith Claims Are Knowledge Claims
• Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that focuses on how we come to knowledge, what knowledge is, and what processes of knowing the world are reliable.
• A knowledge claim is an assertion of truth.
• Those who make faith claims are professing to know something about the external world.
• Much of the confusion about faith-based claims comes from mistaking objective claims with subjective claims.
• Think of subjective claims as matters of taste or opinion.
• Faith claims are knowledge claims. Faith claims are statements of fact about the world.
• Faith Is an Unreliable Epistemology
• The only way to figure out which claims about the world are likely true, and which are likely false, is through reason and evidence. There is no other way.
• “No amount of belief makes something a fact.”
• Faith is an epistemology because it is used as an epistemology.
• Absent any desire to know one is either certain or indifferent.
• Socrates said that a man doesn’t want what he doesn’t think he lacks.
• Wonder, curiosity, honest self-reflection, sincerity, and the desire to know are a solid basis for a life worth living.
• As a Street Epistemologist, one of your primary goals is to help people reclaim the desire to know—a sense of wonder.
• ‘A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.’
• people can and do change their mind in response to reasonable argument.
• Reasoning away faith means helping people to abandon a faulty epistemology, but reasoning away religion means that people abandon their social support network.
• There are five reasons why otherwise reasonable people embrace absurd propositions: (1) they have a history of not formulating their beliefs on the basis of evidence; (2) they formulate their beliefs on what they thought was reliable evidence but wasn’t (e.g., the perception of the testament of the Holy Spirit); (3) they have never been exposed to competing epistemologies and beliefs; (4) they yield to social pressures; and (5) they devalue truth or are relativists.
• Belief revision means changing one’s mind about whether a belief is true or false.
• A “filter bubble” describes the phenomena of online portals—like Google and Facebook—predicting and delivering customized information users want based upon algorithms that take preexisting data into account (e.g., previous searches, type of computer one owns, and geographical location).
• Doxastic openness, as I use the term, is a willingness and ability to revise beliefs.6 Doxastic openness occurs the moment one becomes aware of one’s ignorance; it is the instant one realizes one’s beliefs may not be true. Doxastic openness is the beginning of genuine humility
• A pathogenic belief is a belief that directly or indirectly leads to emotional, psychological, or physical pathology; in other words, holding a pathogenic belief is self-sabotaging and leads one away from human well-being.
• Once you expose a belief or an epistemology as fraudulent, you’re likely to hear statements of greater confidence.
• Having a reliable epistemology doesn’t guarantee that one will act accordingly.
• Most people are afraid of feeling anxiety, and they’ll do anything they can to distract themselves from it.
• When people aren’t reasoned into their faith, it is difficult to reason them out of their faith.
• Many people of faith come to their beliefs independent of reason. In order to reason them out of their faith they’ll have to be taught how to reason first, and then instructed in the application of this new tool to their epistemic condition.
• Interventions are not about winning or losing, they’re about helping people see through a delusion and reclaim a sense of wonder.
• Few things are more dangerous than people who think they’re in possession of absolute truth.
• If someone knows something you don’t know, acknowledge that you don’t know.
• People dig themselves into cognitive sinkholes by habituating themselves to not formulate beliefs on the basis of evidence. Hence the beliefs most people hold are not tethered to reality.
• do not bring particular pieces of evidence (facts, data points) into the discussion when attempting to disabuse people of specific faith propositions.
• Remember: the core of the intervention is not changing beliefs, but changing the way people form beliefs—hence the term “epistemologist.
• Nearly all of the faithful suffer from an acute form of confirmation bias: they start with a core belief first and work their way backward to specific beliefs.
• Every religious apologist is epistemically debilitated by an extreme form of confirmation bias.
• Faith holds up the entire structure of belief. Collapse faith and the entire edifice falls.
• God is the conclusion that one arrives at as a result of a faulty reasoning process (and also social and cultural pressures). The faulty reasoning process— the problem—is faith.
• Belief in God(s) is not the problem. Belief without evidence is the problem.
• Early in the intervention, explicitly ask subjects to assign themselves a number on the Dawkins’ Scale. At the end of the intervention ask them to again assign themselves a number. By doing so you can test the effectiveness of your intervention.
• A solid strategy for lowering your conversational partner’s self-placement on the Dawkins’ Scale, and one that I repeatedly advocate throughout this book, is to focus on epistemology and rarely, if ever, allow metaphysics into the discussion.
• In other words, focus on undermining one’s confidence in how one claims to know what one knows (epistemology) as opposed to what one believes exists (metaphysics/God).
• Again, it’s always advisable to target faith and avoid targeting God.
• The belief that faith is a virtue and that one should have faith are primary impediments to disabusing people of their faith.
• First, I’ll ask, “How could your belief [in X] be wrong?”14 I don’t make a statement about a subject’s beliefs being incorrect; instead, I ask the subject what conditions would have to be in place for her belief to be false.
• Second, I’ll ask, “How would you differentiate your belief from a delusion?
• Simply causing one to consider that their core beliefs could be delusions may help them recognize the delusions.
• Model the behavior you want to emulate.
• Avoid politics whenever possible.
• Bringing up politics when conducting interventions sidetracks the discussion—which should be about faith.
• Trustfulness of reason and willingness to reconsider are two crucial posttreatment attitudes the faithful need in order to make a full recovery.
• System 1 thinking (intuition) is instantaneous, automatic, subconscious, and often has some degree of emotional valence; System 1 thinking is the result of habits and resistance to change. System 2 thinking (reasoning) is much slower, more subject to change, more conscious, and requires more effort.
• Many beliefs are formed on the basis of the System 1 fast-thinking phenomenon.
• The process of genuinely opening oneself up to competing ideas is vital for one’s intellectual life, because it prevents doxastic closure.
• Knowledge = Justified True Belief.
• Knowledge is not a fuzzy thing that we can decide to have or not.
• Meet people “where they are.”
• if one thinks one has the truth, one stops looking.
• “Often as a consequence of sustained Socratic dialogue, one realizes that one did not know something that one thought one knew.”
• The Socratic method may sound complicated, but essentially it’s asking questions and getting answers.
• The Socratic method has five stages: (1) wonder; (2) hypothesis; (3) elenchus, (4) accepting or revising the hypothesis; (5) acting accordingly
• The Socratic method begins in wonder. Someone wonders something:
• Simply put: from wonder a hypothesis emerges.
• Hypotheses are speculative responses to questions posed in stage 1. They’re tentative answers to the object of wonder.
• The elenchus, or question and answer, is the heart of the Socratic method. In the elenchus, which is essentially a logical refutation, Socrates uses counterexamples to challenge the hypothesis.
• The purpose of the counterexample is to call the hypothesis into question and ultimately show that it’s false.
• A hypothesis is never proven to be true. After a hypothesis survives repeated iterations in the elenchus, this only means that to date it has withstood a process of falsification.
• A single counterexample can kill a hypothesis, yet even millions of confirming instances don’t change the status of the hypothesis. (There’s an asymmetry between confirmation and disconfirmation.)
• The elenchus is a simple yet effective way to undermine a hypothesis by eliciting contradictions and inconsistencies in one’s reasoning, and thus engendering aporia.
• “I don’t know” is a deceptively powerful statement.
• A pregnant pause is a very useful, nonthreatening technique, typically used in sales, to get the result you want.
• Humor is an incredibly effective and underused dialectical technique, probably underused because there are so many ways it can backfire.
• I never allow people to steer these discussions from faith is true to faith is beneficial (comforting) unless they explicitly acknowledge that faith is not a reliable guide to reality.
• The phrase “open yourself up” and the word “gift” are frequently used to indoctrinate people into faith systems. These terms may also be effective in nudging people toward embracing reason.
• When administering Socratic treatments, make sure to offer as few hypotheses as possible.
• (Asking people to “just pray about it” pushes them into a form of confirmation bias where the very act of prayer means they’ve already bought back into the system they just escaped.)
• Socratic interventions are easy to administer, no-cost treatments that can engender doxastic openness and even separate faith from its host. The main way this happens is by helping expose contradictions and inconsistencies in subjects’ reasoning processes.
• After an intervention, don’t leave the subject hanging. Be prepared to provide names, contact information, and resources that can help.
• Always be prepared to furnish resources at the end of your intervention, and also have that information on hand just in case you run into a subject at a later time.
• Forming new relationships is important because these interactions mitigate the risk of recidivating and falling back into faith communities.
• Sam Harris observed that there are only three defenses offered in response to critiques of religion (Harris, 2007b): (1) Religion is true; (2) Religion is useful; (3) Atheism is somehow corrosive of society or other values.
• No faith is needed to posit that the universe may have always existed.
• Anyone who says, “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist,” doesn’t understand what the word “atheist” means, or is simply insincere.
• Science is the antithesis of faith. Science is a process that contains multiple and redundant checks, balances, and safeguards against human bias. Science has a built-in corrective mechanism—hypothesis testing— that weeds out false claims.
• Science is a method of advancing our understanding. It is a process we can use to bring us closer to the truth and to weed out false claims. Science is the best way we’ve currently found to explain and understand how the universe works.
• Equating an extraordinary claim with a mundane one, and then suggesting they “both require faith,” is disanalogous.
• The more people who share a faulty process of reasoning the greater the magnification of potential harm.
• “What people believe, and how they act, matter. They particularly matter in a democracy where people have a certain amount of influence over the lives of their fellow citizens.
• A criticism of an idea is not the same as a criticism of a person.
• Ideas don’t deserve dignity; people deserve dignity.
• The basic idea behind cultural relativism is that because everyone is always judging a culture from their own particular, situated cultural viewpoint, it’s therefore impossible to make reliable judgments about other cultures and cultural practices. This means that cultures and cultural practices cannot be judged.
• When one believes dignity is a property of ideas and not just a property of people, then criticizing an idea becomes akin to criticizing a person.
• Tolerance only works when there’s reciprocity. That is, tolerance doesn’t handle intolerance very well.
• Correcting students’ reasoning processes, and granting faith-based responses no countenance, needs to be the academic, cultural, and pedagogical norm across all academic disciplines.
• In order to reason well, one needs to be able to rule out competing or irrelevant alternatives. But one cannot do this if one believes that there’s no way to make an objective judgment about those alternatives.
• Generally, praise is underused in advancing dialogue.
• (For better or worse, putting the onus of action on someone usually ends the discourse, as most people won’t act beyond the initial contact.)
• Curriculum Resource Center (http://www.skeptic.com/skepticism-101/): “A comprehensive, free repository of resources for teaching students how to think skeptically.
• Historically, philosophy has focused on truth. Contemporary philosophy instead focuses on meaning.
• Faith is an unclassified cognitive illness disguised as a moral virtue.
• People infected with faith don’t think of it as a malady, but as a gift, even a blessing.
• If you’re fortunate enough to engage imams, mullahs, rabbis, pastors, ministers, clerics, swamis, gurus, chaplains, shamans, priests, witch doctors, or any other faith leaders, be blunt and direct when demanding evidence for their claims.
• Atheism is skepticism applied to a specific extraordinary claim, and children should be taught to apply skepticism to claims in general—not just faith and extraordinary metaphysical claims.
• act the way you want others—particularly your children—to act.

The One Minute Millionaire by Robert G. Allen

• A dream + A Team + A Theme = Millionaire Streams
• Dream: Building the Millionaire Mind-set--self-confidence and burning desire.
• Team: Attracting mentors and master-minding partners to help make your dream a reality.
• Theme: Selecting and applying one or more of the basic millionaire models for making money fast.
• The journey to financial freedom starts the minute you decide that you were destined for prosperity, not scarcity--for abundance, not lack.
• Realize that almost every day you have a new million-dollar idea.
• The Enlightened millionaire pursues a principles approach to wealth:
• First, do no harm.
• Second, do much good.
• Third, operate out of stewardship.
• Borrowing from the Hippocratic oath that many doctors take as they graduate from medical school, the Enlightened Millionaire commits to avoid any wealth-building activities that harm or impoverish other people.
• Create only abundance, never scarcity. This means creating wealth in an ethical, honest, and win/win manner.
• The enlightened millionaire enjoys creating wealth that improves the lives of many people. The goal is to enrich oneself while enriching others.
• Enlightened millionaires are stewards over their financial blessings--enjoying the privileges of financial success while creating an ongoing legacy to bless others.
• The long route is the safest and easiest. You can literally become a millionaire by investing as little as a dollar a day.
• To become a millionaire in your lifetime, all that is required is (1) the ability to find investments that yield at least 10% annually after taxes and (2) the discipline to keep up the process, year in and year out.
• In the whole wide world of money there are only four major ways of becoming a millionaire. No matter what your background, you can learn to master one of these areas.
• Investments: Accumulating shares of stock, bonds, CDs.
• Real Estate: Owning properties.
• Business: Marketing products, services, or ideas.
• Internet: Expanding possibilities.
• Abundance comes from making others better off, and the primary reason to get is to have more to give.
• Life is a succession of choices. The enlightened millionaires embraces each outcome from “above the line”. As much as possible is learned from each situation. As a result, the next choice is more likely to be wiser.
• The universe is fundamentally abundant. There is no shortage, except in our own mind.
• Opportunities and blessings come to individuals who embrace an abundant attitude. Others everywhere have created abundance, so can you.
• When you subtract your liabilities from assets, you came up with what is known as “net worth”. If you want to be a net millionaires, what you own minus what you owe must equal more than a million dollars.
• Literally, as a beginner, there are only three resources you need: a good idea; the commitment to do it; the key contacts who possess all the other resources.
• Let’s not forget physical freedom. Health is the ultimate wealth. With time to exercise and money to buy the finest nutrition, nutritional supplements, and health care, you can maintain your health for as long as humanly possible.
• Give yourself permission to dream a big dream.
• Goals are critical to your success. We recommend you start a special notebook for your goals. Whenever you think of something you would like to accomplish in your life, write it down in your goal book. Then, on a daily basis, write your six major goals.
• To become rich one minute at a time requires that you do what you love doing and you are passionate about it.
• Remember, the force that propels human action is emotion. Feelings--not cold cognitions--drive enlightened millionaires to turn good ideas into great value. If you love what you are doing, it is much easier.
• To create permanent change within a material of a human being, a force must be applied that is strong enough to exceed the “elastic limits” of the object or old conditioning of the individual.
• When you fail to keep your commitment (most people will), just acknowledge the failure and recommit.
• Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.
• Getting your act together is the final key to manifesting what you want in your life.
• Live life above the line. If you are willing to learn instead of to blame, life will go more smoothly.
• Changing your reality is a snap. Control your thinking and you control your results.
• You are your wealth. All you need is a good idea and the commitment to do it. All the rest can be borrowed.
• Clarity is power. Don’t think of your goals, think from your goals.
• More clarity is more powerful. Write your six major goals down every day.
• Leverage equals speed. If you want to create wealth, you need leverage. Lots of it.
• There are three parts to leverage. The first part is the objective (the Dream) that you intend to bring into reality. The second part is the fulcrum. That is you. You are the object upon which the lever pivots. The third part is the lever itself.
• Enlightened millionaires know speed is the new currency of business.
• All large sums of money embrace the generalized principle of leverage.
• Leverage is the power to control a lot with just a little.
• In business there are five kinds of leverage:
• OPM--Other People’s Money
• OPE--Other People’s Experience
• OPI--Other People’s Ideas
• OPT--Other People’s Time
• OPW--Other People’s Word
• The first form of leverage is to acquire a mentor.
• Your second form of leverage is to acquire a team.
• Your third form of leverage is a network.
• Obviously, a one-person team is not enough. You need the power of a network. In that network, there are several key contacts--people who control huge networks of people. A key contact has “make it happen” power.
• Your fifth form of leverage is the use of tools and skills.
• If you want a speedy result, you need instant information.
• Your sixth form of leverage is systems. Every millionaire has systematized, streamlined, and organized the process of wealth.
• The most efficient form of information transfer is to learn your mentor’s system and follow it. Learn the system.
• When the combined force of mentors, teams, networks, Infinite Networks, tools, and systems is applied to a strong, long lever, miracles can happen in minutes.
• Leverage equals speed. To make a million dollars in a minute, you must master the principle of leverage. The more leverage you have in your added-value activity, the easier and faster you make money.
• The longer the lever, the greater the impact. Enlightened millionaires know that ease and speed are the new currencies of business.
• Millionaires are masters at using all five kinds of leverage in the business world:
• OPM--Other People’s Money
• OPE--Other People’s Experience
• OPI--Other People’s Ideas
• OPT--Other People’s Time
• OPW--Other People’s Work
• Millionaires are constantly looking for leverage.
• There are six key forms of leverage that give you maximum leverage:
• Mentors
• Teams
• Networks
• Infinite Networks
• Tools and skills
• Systems
• Experience plus time equals wisdom. A mentor can give us the wisdom of a lifetime of experience.
• A mentor can give us perspective.
• A mentor can give us proficiency.
• A mentor gives us patience.
• All masters take on assistants to do their “grunt work”--to help them leverage their time. Accept it. Do it better, faster, and with a more upbeat attitude than anyone else. Offer constantly to go the extra mile. Anticipate the master’s needs, wants, and desires.
• In business, you are either leading edge, cutting edge, dull edge, or trailing edge. You need to be at the leading edge. To be there you must master a discipline. The quickest, safest, and easiest way to do this is to apprentice with someone who leads in that field.
• The greatest dragon you’ll ever face is your own fear. If you can learn to live with the fear, the world is yours. Face your fear today.
• Informational learning is predominant in our educational system. Teachers talk; students listen, take notes, take tests, get grades, and so on. It’s all about memorization and regurgitation.
• Transformational learning is about empowering students to discover the answers for themselves. It’s a slower process, but much more profound. That’s why it’s transformational.
• Every successful person has mentors. A mentor is a shortcut to perspective, proficiency, and patience.
• Mentoring is a powerful form of leverage. Drawing from your mentor’s experience is the quickest, safest, and easiest way to climb the millionaire mountain.
• Mentors are everywhere. Each person you meet can “accidentally” teach you something to advance your cause.
• Mentors don’t need to be people. Anything that causes you to change course in life can serve as a mentor.
• Constantly seek out mentoring relationships. When you find yourself lacking in anything seek a mentor to show you the shortcut.
• Assemble a dream team of your favorite heroes and sheroes, present and past. Form an imaginary council of light consisting of your selected leaders. Imagine being able to counsel with them as if they were communicating with you in person.
• Set a goal to search out at least one millionaire a month. Request an audience, either in person, by phone, or by e-mail to pick your millionaire mentor’s brains.
• The best kind of mentor is a transformational mentor. A transformational mentor creates a context in which you experience ahas.
• Every great idea is born drowning. This means that the best ideas have plenty of things wrong with them. This doesn’t mean they should be dismissed. Yet in most meetings or collaborations, an idea with anything wrong with it gets showdown as unworkable.
• An idea must have time to grow, to be supported. Then, when it's time has come, it can be selected and perfected.
• Your network of relationships increases your leverage. The more connections you have, the more leverage you possess.
• To make vast sums of money fast you need to have relationships with those who generate successful results fast, competently, and consistently.
• Each industry has only a handful of superstars. You need to study them--read their books, listen to their speeches, watch their videos--befriend them, and be close to them to be part of the action.
• While you are apprenticing, collect the names, addresses, and phone numbers of all the people you meet.
• Make yourself eminently likeable. Develop an above-average handshake, a magnetic eye contact, and a radiant presence. Choose to serve greatly for the sake of serving. Help everyone whom you can help. Always go the extra mile and put the universe in your debt.
• Choose to make yourself well known. Get a reputation that everyone likes, trusts, respects, and admires you. You are here to make a significant contribution and you can do so more easily with a strong and well-established network.
• Start at once whether you are ready or not.
• One way to strengthen your weak-tie networks is to give something away for free that is valuable to network members.
• Once you have created a network, do whatever it takes to maintain it. The golden rule of networking is: “Be very quick to build connections and extremely slow to break them.”
• A network of relationships increases your leverage. The more connections you have, the more leverage you possess.
• One principle for extending your network lever is “weak ties”. Most people intuitively feel it is their close friendships and strong ties that are most important. In fact, in most cases, your weak ties are more important.
• You must master the strength of the weak tie. Most people do not instinctively cultivate “weak-tie” relationships. However, to make large sums of money quickly, you need to hone this skill.
• Those who “network the networks” gain the most leverage. The value of your network is the square of the number of people in it.
• “Givers gain” is your networking motto. Give something away for free that is valuable to network members. It brings attention to you and it builds trust. Do not expect reciprocity.
• Once you have created a network, do whatever it takes to maintain it. The golden rule of networking is: “By very quick to build connections and extremely slow to break them.”
• The person who chooses to master the skill of persuasion can positively affect millions around the world.
• Master teachers and leaders have always used storytelling to effectively communicate their point of view and illustrate their arguments. Stories pain an irresistibly compelling word picture that communicates heart to heart and soul to soul.
• Effective listening is a rare skill. You quest is to listen with your outer and inner ear to discover what people truly want. You may get your answer by asking them directly--oftentimes the direct approach does work. Other times you need to probe deeper and talk to their personal assistants, secretaries, associates, friends, or relatives.
• Just remember, everybody wants something. Your task is to discover it.
• MoneySkill #1--Value. They value eac dollar bill as a money seed.
• MoneySkill #2--Control. They control their money down to the penny.
• MoneySkill #3--Save. Wealthy people love to save money by spending wisely. But they don’t stop there. They save at least 10% of what they earn.
• MoneySkill #4--Invest. They have a system for investing their money.
• MoneySkill #5--Earn. They have multiple streams of income outside their job.
• MoneySkill #6--Shield. They protect themselves with trusts, corporations, limited partnerships, LLCs, and other legal entities.
• In truth, you don’t want to be a millionaire. You want to live like a millionaire but have very few assets in your own name.
• The goal of negotiation is not to win at someone else’s expense. Rather, it is to expand what is possible. Success is defined by how much bigger the pie is after the negotiation than before.
• Focus on the critical few. Eighty-five percent of the things you do account for only 15% of your results. And vice versa. Therefore, only work on the critical things and you’ll get there faster and with less effort.
• Learn how to procrastinate! Procrastination is absolutely essential to your success. Just make sure you procrastinate the right things.
• Throw away your “to-do” list. Create instead an 85/15 list. Only work on the top of your list.
• Reward yourself for doing the right things. The things that get rewarded get done. If you reward yourself for your most positive actions, you will get more of them done...almost effortlessly.
• Do your FTF: Feared Things First. Which activity on your list do you fear the most? That’s your FTF. When you start your day, ask yourself, “What’s my FTF today?” Start your day with that activity. By training yourself to do your FTF, you unconsciously urge yourself to tackle tougher tasks.
• Do a daily power hour. Take a few minutes every day for planning. Planning is like a rehearsal.
• Don’t step on the stage of life without rehearsing your performance.
• Exercise. It helps you work harder, longer, and think more clearly. It increases your health span and your life span.
• Layer your activities. Use your waiting time productively. Do two things at once. Listen to tapes while exercising, driving, or standing in line. Constantly ask yourself this question: “Is this the most productive use of my time?”
• Write out your goals daily.
• Just say “No!” Don’t let other people dump their “monkeys” on you. Sometimes you just have to say no.
• Master the power of persuasion. The person who chooses to master the skill of persuasion can positively affect millions around the world. You can learn to persuade. You can learn to sculpt your words and phrases into masterpieces that evoke the response you want. People want someone to persuade and lead them in the right direction; you can be that someone.
• Wealthy people are good at the seven money skills.
• Value: Each dollar bill as a money seed.
• Control: Control your money to the penny.
• Save: Save at least 10% of the money you earn.
• Invest: Have a system for investing your money.
• Earn: Have MSIs outside your job.
• Shield: Protect yourself with legal entities.
• Share: Donate at least 10% of your income.
• Enlighted millionaires search for successful systems before they launch their money making vehicles. Having the right system gives you enormous leverage. This is the essence of systems thinking.
• There are dozens of systems for making money. The word system forms an acronym: Save Yourself Time Energy Money
• When you have a system, it saves you time, energy, and money. In the beginning, if you don’t have a system, it’s almost impossible to succeed.
• Operate from your highest and best thinking.
• Life is energy. Your invested energy is your life. You want the greatest possible returns per unit of energy invested.
• Energy well invested will give you a great return on your investment.
• Smart people recognize the need to cultivate a portfolio of income streams--not one or two, but many streams from completely different and diversified sources. If one stream goes dry, it doesn’t bother them. They have time to adjust. They’re stable, safe.
• Residual income--that’s a fancy term for a “recurring” stream of income that continues to flow whether you’re there or note. In other words, making money while you sleep.
• With residual income you work hard once, and it unleashes a steady flow of income for months or even years. You get paid over and over again for the same effort.
• Ninety-four percent of failure is caused by the system, not the people. Most people want to do a good job. Ninety-four percent of all failures are not because people don’t want to do a good job. It’s because the system they were using failed.
• Ideal money making systems have five characteristics:
• Zero cash
• Zero risk
• Zero time
• Zero management
• Zero energy
• Look for sellers who are forced to liquidate their real estate to solve a cash need.
• Look for mortgage holders who are anxious to liquidate their mortgages at a discount to solve an immediate cash need.
• As complicated as real estate investing may seem, it really boils down to becoming proficient in three specific skills:
• Finding deals: How to find real estate bargains.
• Funding deals: Qualifying for mortgages and finding down payments.
• Flipping deals: How to remarket the property quickly and profitably.
• Only buy residential property within 50 miles of your home. Single-family homes, apartment buildings, condominiums, are easier to sell, to rent, and to finance. Stay away from anything else.
• Pick a target territorial about one mile square and become an expert there. Within these boundaries there will be 3 to 10 excellent bargains per year. Be there first.
• Use one of nine methods to locate motivated sellers. People become flexible in the selling of their property for numerous reasons:
• Management, money problems
• Out of area, out of work, out of luck, out of time, out of money
• Transfer
• Illness, inheritance, ignorance
• Vacancy
• Area in decline, attorney problems (lawsuits, liens, bankruptcies)
• Tax problems
• Estate and probate problems, emergency, early retirement
• Delinquent payments, divorce, death, debts, dissolution of partnership
• Here are nine of the many ways to find motivated sellers: (1) classified ads, (2) run your own paid ads, (3) Realtors, (4) canvass a target territory, (5) friends and contacts, (6) banks, (7) the county courthouse, (8) investment clubs, (9) professionals (accountants, attorneys, etc.).
• Determine which nothing down technique to use. Nothing down is an attitude. Quite simply it means that you want to use OPR--Other People’s Resources--whenever possible.
• As an inventor, you are searching for the 1% to 5% of the sellers who need to sell NOW--and are willing to accept unconventional solutions.
• Hard money refers to funds borrowed from banks and lending institutions under strict conditions of qualifying and repayment, generally at market interest rates.
• Buying real estate is a numbers game. You may need to scan through 200 properties to find 20 that show promise. Of these, maybe 10 warrant an on-site inspection. And of these, only two or three warrant writing an offer. Thin it make take 10 written offers before one seller agrees to your terms. Don’t get discouraged.
• To be a successful investor, you must either find value or create value. Here is what you’re looking for:
• Discount situations
• Distressed properties
• Conversion opportunities
• Being a successful as a real estate investor boils down to mastering three specific skills:
• Finding deals: How to find real estate bargains.
• Funding deals: Qualifying for mortgages and finding down payments.
• Flipping deals: Marketing properties quickly and profitably.
• There are seven steps to this process:
• Only buy residential property within a 50-mile radius of your home.
• Pick a target territory about one mile square an become an expert there.
• Use one of nine methods to locate motivated sellers.
• Analyze each potential deal by asking five key questions.
• Determine which nothing down technique to use.
• Write offers on all properties that score 12 or more.
• Buy it! Keep it or flip it.
• One of the fastest ways to create wealth is in climbing the business mountain. If you want to reach the summit of this mountain quickly--a million-dollar profit in a year or less--you need three things:
• Dream: A clear vision and a definite “why”.
• Team: A network of expert mastermind partners.
• Theme: A million-dollar product, service, or idea.
• The world is desperate to have more entrepreneurs.
• According to Warren Buffet, there are only two ways to create wealth: find value or create value.
• Entrepreneurs find and create massive value for other people at a profit.
• Marketing is the oxygen of your new business.
• Look for addicts. Every one of us is positively addicted to something. Addicts make the best customers. Addicts buy quickly and more often. Addicts talk to other addicts.
• Look for addicts. Make your marketing addicting with a powerful USP. Leverage yourself with partners. Reviewing this list for one minute each day will put you ahead of 99% of all businesses in the world.
• The main reason why so many businesses fail is precisely because they waste so much money on traditional marketing in finding or “targeting” customers.
• The clearer you become in what you want your perfect customers to expect from you, the more of them will appear--quickly and easily.
• There is no better way to make millions than being an infopreneur.
• Almost all success books start off with a miserable failure.
• One mediocre idea with some good marketing can generate a lifetime stream of cash flow. And with some luck can turn into millions.
• The internet is the ultimate 24-hour-a-day money machine.
• Million-dollar ideas are floating around you every day. You just have to recognize them and act on them.
• Discover which of the 10 basic business models fits you and your circumstances. Do you want to sell to customers, businesses, government agencies, or charities?
• Create your one minute marketing plan. Review your plan for at least one minute daily. It will put you ahead of 99% of businesses.
• Use the essentials of marketing success:
• Look for positive addicts.
• Make your ads addicting, with an ultimate advantage, a sensational offer, and a powerful promise.
• Leverage your efforts with joint venture partners.
• Use anti marketing strategies. Attract perfect customers by focusing on and specifically attracting the 20% of your customers who give you 80% of your profits.
• Become an infopreneur. Learn to market information products where the profit margins are up to 95%.
• Make up to a million dollars in a minute on the internet. Information that is digitized can be marketed and sold 24 hours a day online.
• The only diploma that counts is a million-dollar idea. The only qualification needed is a burning desire. The only credential required is fearless action. Everything else can be borrowed or bought.